John J. Carlano Prints

Requiem

John J. Carlano
Artist statement, fall 2010

There are objects that comfort us and in some cases can be seen as possessing great beauty, symbolic, nostalgic, aesthetic, and mysterious. Beauty is however subjective and fugitive. All is change, people, places, and things we loved we can find increasingly less interesting compared to newer places and experiences. This can also be a form of growth.

These images were made as a reaction to the unavoidable nature of loss. That which one imagines possessing will evaporate into a mist. All things great and miniscule are leveled and changed. Still we reinvent, rediscover, and move on, thus the work that you see before you.

The process is in poetic cahoots with all-aforementioned. It is a serendipitous silver printing process I evolved during the late 1980s’ and early 1990s’. It involves a dripping away of photographic information via chemistry and gravity of the exposed silver particles.

Few prints survive this process and the ones that do are precious.

The resulting relationship between process and concept work for me as a way to philosophize about the nature of things, wonderful and no so, but certainly, hopefully, we can learn to appreciate that and those which and who are present.

Biography

John J. Carlano runs a commercial photography studio located in The Crane Arts Building in Philadelphia.

Johns client list is diverse ranging from art-based to corporate-based interests, from product shooting for Motorola, or RCA , to portraits for the various schools at The University of Pennsylvania, or diverse Magazine assignments, or shooting tequila production in Mexico for The Siembra Azul Corporation.

Johns primary interest remains in a life long investigation of a fine art based image making, changing materials and content whenever it seems appropriate. For 20 years John worked with chemically altering silver prints to achieve patinas beyond toning, manifested in portraits and still lives and landscapes.

Currently John is discovering how digital technologies can address similar visual concerns in a way that is less toxic to the environment and his own body, photographing “photographs” of the nude, and manipulating the image in multiple ways. Questions are asked about what is new and what is historic and what is photographic.

John Carlano’s photographs have been shown nationally and internationally since 1978.

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